Top Marble Quotes

Favorite Marble Quotes

1. "A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination."Author: Ada Louise Huxtable

2. "Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor."Author: Alexis Carrel

3. "It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear."Author: Andrei Codrescu

4. "It put him in mind of the grand death of Julius Caesar, stabbed by a throng of Roman senators and dying very decoratively, scarlet on marble, harmoniously framed by columns. Would that some great Sienese could bring himself to die in a like manner, allowing the Maestro to indulge in the scene on a local wall."Author: Anne Fortier

5. "Snow crunched under the feet of three cloaked figures – a queen, her lady, and a gravedigger – as they hurried along a moonlit path in Windsor Castle's lower ward. The gravedigger pushed a cart that held a slab of marble, his pick and shovel, and some straw. When the trio reached the steps of St. George's Chapel, Queen Mary stopped. She turned her head, pushing aside the fur of her hood, and a gust of wind needled her with crystallized snow. She looked back at her attendants. Was she wrong to trust them with this night's work?"Author: Barbara Kyle

6. "'Really,' thought I, 'we call Baltimore the 'Monumental City' for its two marble columns, and here is Edinburg with one at every street-corner!'"Author: Bayard Taylor

7. "When you lose a friend [in battle] you have an overpowering desire to go back home and yell in everybody's ear, "This guy was killed fighting for you. Don't forget him--ever. Keep him in your mind when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Don't think of him as the statistic which changes 38,788 casualties to 38,789. Think of him as a guy who wanted to live every bit as much as you do. Don't let him be just one of 'Our Brave Boys' from the old home town, to whom a marble monument is erected in the city park, and a civic-minded lady calls the newspaper ten years later and wants to know why that 'unsightly stone' isn't removed."Author: Bill Mauldin

8. "I hadn't learned anything new, except that another one of the Dead Elvises had an affinity for the Shop-n-Go. And Jack officially thought I'd lost my last marble."Author: Brodi Ashton

9. "Niches set back in the walls contained polished marble statues of entwined bodies. Will looked away from them hastily, and then back. It wasn't as if Magnus seemed to be paying attention to what Will was doing, and he'd honestly never imagined two people could get themselves into a position like that, much less make it look artistic."Author: Cassandra Clare

10. "I could write an epic poem about your thighs.""That would amuse polite society rather too much, and I wouldn't like that.""I wouldn't either." She pressed her cheek to his belly. "I can't think of a word to rhyme with marble column."Author: Christina Dodd

11. "I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather...the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose, the line of the law-so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are always-short of the blantant theft or cold-blooded murder-safely on the right side."Author: Dean Koontz

12. "Rather a thousand times the county jail than to lie under this marble figure with wings and this granite pedestal bearing the words "pro patria." What do they mean anyway?"Author: Edgar Lee Masters

13. "A ghost in marble of a girl you knewWho would have loved you in a day or two."Author: Edna St. Vincent Millay

14. "In fact, since the accident, Mom doesn't love anyone. She is marble. Beautiful. Frigid. Easily stained by her family. What's left of us anyway. We are corpses.At first, we sought rebirth. But resurrection devoid of her love has made us zombies. We get up every morning, skip breakfast, hurry off to work or school. For in those other places, we are more at home.And sometimes we stagger beneath the weight of grief, the immensity of aloneness."Author: Ellen Hopkins

15. "She still had all of her marbles, though every one of them was a bit odd and rolled asymmetrically."Author: Ellen Klages

16. "(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn."Author: Erich Maria Remarque

17. "I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I've seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood'. In fact, ‘flesh and blood' describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher's marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive."Author: Fernando Pessoa

19. "Guess what it is that turns plants to coal.Pressure.Guess what it is that turns limestone to marble.Pressure.Guess what it is that turns Briony's heart to stone.Pressure.Pressure is uncomfortable, but so are the gallows. Keep your secrets, wolfgirl. Dance your fists with Eldric's, snatch lightning from the gods. Howl at the moon, at the blood-red moon. Let your mouth be a cavern of stars."Author: Franny Billingsley

20. "You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman."Author: George Edward Woodberry

21. "Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world—all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation…the vastness of St. Peter's the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina."Author: George Eliot

22. "Entering by a wide gateway, but without gates, into an inner court,surrounded on all sides by great marble pillars supporting galleriesabove, I saw a large fountain of porphyry in the middle, throwingup a lofty column of water, which fell, with a noise as of the fusionof all sweet sounds, into a basin beneath; overflowing which, it raninto a single channel towards the interior of the building. Althoughthe moon was by this time so low in the west, that not a ray of herlight fell into the court, over the height of the surrounding buildings; yet was the court lighted by a second reflex from the sun ofother lands. For the top of the column of water, just as it spread tofall, caught the moonbeams, and like a great pale lamp, hung highin the night air, threw a dim memory of light (as it were) over thecourt below."Author: George MacDonald

23. "Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn:It listens, listens. Taller trees beyondListen. The moon at the unruffled pondStares. And you sing, you sing.That star-enchanted song falls through the airFrom lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground;And all the night you sing.My dreams are flowers to which you are a beeAs all night long I listen, and my brainReceives your song, then loses it againIn moonlight on the lawn.Now is your voice a marble high and white,Then like a mist on fields of paradise,Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,Then breaks, and it is dawn."Author: Harold Monro

24. "The gods are made of marble Deep inside a museum A quadruped monster beckons me to approach("Outcries")"Author: Hélène Baronne D’Oettingen

25. "Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time."Author: Henry David Thoreau

26. "... the round towers of the castles looked as if they were so firmly encrusted in the sky that, to get to their other side, one would have to hew out a passage through the celestial marble."Author: Hope Mirrlees

27. "As that fucking chandelier twinkled overhead, Blay said roughly, "I'm still in love with him."Saxton dropped his eyes and brushed a the top of his thigh, as if there might have been a tiny piece of lint there. "I know. You thought you weren't?"As if that were rather stupid of him."I'm so fucking tired of it. I really am.""That I believe.""Im so fucking..." God, those sounds, that muted pounding , that audible confirmation of what he had been ignoring for the past year--On a sudden wave of violence, he pitched the brandy snifter at the marble fireplace, shattering the thing."Fuck, Fuck!" If he'd been able to, he'd have jumped up and torn that goddamn cocksucking light fixture off the goddamn cocksucking ceiling."Author: J.R. Ward

29. "A set of huge marble busts stared smugly down from on high: great merchants and financiers of Styrian history, by the look of them. Criminals made heroes by colossal success."Author: Joe Abercrombie

30. "The genius of Cornell is that he sees and enables us to see with the eyes of childhood, before our vision got clouded by experience, when objects like a rubber ball or a pocket mirror seemed charged with meaning, and a marble rolling across a wooden floor could be as portentous as a passing comet."Author: John Ashbery

31. "Most people are on the world, not in it-- having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them-- undiffused seporate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but seporate."Author: John Muir

32. "I'd left behind a thousand tons of marble, I could have released sculptures, I could have released myself from the marble of myself. I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough?"Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

33. "When my dad was young he shot marbles. When I was young I played Marble Madness on my Nintendo Entertainment System."Author: Kevin James Breaux

34. "Three old men with moon-silver hair and slow, ponderous movement took him in their arms and laid him on a marble slab and set silver coins on his eyes and swung incense over him, murmuring aspriests do to fill what might otherwise be a god-sent silence."Author: M.C. Scott

35. "First love is the only pure and happy one. If it goes wrong, nothing can replace it. Later loves can never attain to the same limpid perfection; though they may be as solid, as marble, they are streaked with veins of another colour, the dried blood of the past."Author: Maurice Druon

36. "There are no such things as the Elgin Marbles."Author: Melina Mercouri

37. "When he at least reached the door the handle had cease to vibrate. Lowering himself suddenly to his knees he placed his head and the vagaries of his left eye (which was for ever trying to dash up and down the vertical surface of the door), he was able by dint of concentration to observe, within three inches of his keyholed eye, an eye which was not his, being not only of a different colour to his own iron marble, but being, which is more convincing, on the other side of the door."Author: Mervyn Peake

38. "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."Author: Michelangelo

39. "Lord, if I thought you were listening, I'd pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive. That it should be not like a palace with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood for the carpenter; but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place. Does the tree say to the sparrow, 'Get out, you don't belong here?' Does the tree say to the hungry man, 'This fruit is not for you?' Does the tree test the loyalty of the beasts before it allows them into the shade?"Author: Philip Pullman

40. "Nick stands up and offers his hand to me. I have no idea what he wants, but what the hell, I take his hand anyway, and he pulls me up on my feet then presses against me for a slow dance and it's like we're in a dream where he's Christopher Plummer and I'm Julie Andrews and we're dancing on the marble floor of an Austrian terrace garden. Somehow my head presses Nick's t-shirt and in this moment I am forgetting about time and Tal because maybe my life isn't over. Maybe it's only beginning."Author: Rachel Cohn

41. "After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble."Author: Richard Russo

42. "Whether I played marbles, whether I played football or slam anything else, I wanted to excel."Author: Robert Mondavi

43. "If you were my girlfriend I would give you a hundred lightning bugs in a green glass jar, so you could always see your way. I would give you a meadow full of wildflowers, where no two blooms would ever be alike. I would give you my bicycle, with its golden eye to protect you. I would write a story for you, and make you a princess who lived in a white marble castle. If you would only like me, I would give you magic. If you would only like me."Author: Robert R. McCammon

44. "Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated Challengers of oblivion Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, The square-limbed Roman letters Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems."Author: Robinson Jeffers

45. "I wrenched the door out of my way?ridiculously eager?and there he was, my personal miracle.Time had not made me immune to the perfection of his face, and I was sure that I would never take any aspect of him for granted. My eyes traced over his pale white features: the hard square of his jaw, the softer curve of his full lips?twisted up into a smile now, the straight line of his nose, the sharp angle of his cheekbones, the smooth marble span of his forehead?partially obscured by a tangle of rain-darkened bronze hair . . .I saved his eyes for last, knowing that when I looked into them I was likely to lose my train of thought. They were wide, warm with liquid gold, and framed by a thick fringe of black lashes. Staring into his eyes always made me feel extraordinary?sort of like my bone were turning spongy. I was also a little lightheaded, but that could have been because I'd forgotten to keep breathing. Again."Author: Stephenie Meyer

46. "Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel."Author: Theophile Gautier

48. "I especially treasured my glimpses of Mother, Queen Cleopatra VII. She sat on a golden throne, looking as resplendent as one of the giant marble statues guarding the tombs of the Old Ones. Diamonds twinkled in a jungle of black braids on her ceremonial wig. She wore a diadem with three rearing snakes and a golden broad collar, shining with lapis lazuli, carnelian, and emeralds, over her golden, form-fitting pleated gown. In one hand, she held a golden ankh of life, while the other clasped the striped crook and flail of her divine rulership. Her stillness radiated power, like a lioness pausing before the pounce. It left me breathless with awe."Author: Vicky Alvear Shecter

49. "CITY OF THE WORLD (FOR ALL RACES ARE HERE, ALL THE LANDS OF THE EARTH MAKE CONTRIBUTIONS HERE), CITY OF THE SEA! CITY OF WHARVES AND STORES - CITY OF TALL FACADES OF MARBLE AND IRON! PROUD AND PASSIONATE CITY - METTLESOME, MAD, EXTRAVAGANT CITY!"Author: Walt Whitman

50. "A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty."Author: William C. Bryant

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Today's Quote

War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation." Author: Alasdair Gray